With development of the mobile Internet and popularization of intelligent terminals, data traffic increases explosively. A Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) becomes one of current mainstream mobile broadband access technologies due to advantages in a high speed and low costs of the wireless local area network. In a next-generation WLAN system 802.11ax, an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access, OFDMA for short) technology may be introduced to improve system resource usage. Specifically, the OFDMA technology may be used to simultaneously allocate different channel resources to different users, so that multiple users efficiently access a channel, thereby improving channel usage. For the WLAN, introduction of the OFDMA technology may enable an access point (Access Point, AP for short) to perform uplink and downlink transmission for different stations (Station, STA for short) on different time-frequency resources. However, after the OFDMA technology is introduced to the next-generation WLAN system 802.11ax, a current problem is how to perform resource indication.
In the prior art, refer to a Long Term Evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE for short) system in which the OFDMA technology is used. In the LTE system, a resource is indicated in a manner of transmitting downlink control information (Downlink Control Information, DCI for short) by using a physical downlink control channel (Physical Downlink Control Channel, PDCCH for short). The DCI carries resource indication information of all corresponding user equipments (User Equipment, UE for short). After receiving the DCI, UE searches DCI space in a blind detection manner, to obtain resource indication information of the UE.
However, in the LTE system resource indication manner, each UE needs to search the entire DCI for resource indication information of the UE in a blind detection manner. This has a high requirement for a processing capability of the UE. If the LTE system resource indication manner is directly used in a low-cost WLAN, costs and resource consumption of the WLAN may greatly increase.